On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 01:01:52PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote > Is there a better way we can have our cake and eat it too? I'll admit > that a huge package.use on the minimal profile isn't a whole lot > better than a huge package.use on all the other profiles. > > Do we need another form of syntax in individual ebuilds to try to > separate out the various cases you cite? Does anybody care to > actually suggest one? > > I still think that we shouldn't encourage users to lightly deviate > from all the upstream defaults. There are of course legitimate > reasons for doing so, and you and I can probably appreciate when we > should do this, but for somebody starting out we're giving them a lot > of rope to hang themselves with.
The "case" for IUSE often depends on a fallacious strawman argument about USE="-*". The strawman argument is that people run with the USE variable in make.conf consisting of "USE=-*" and that every package requires an entry in package.use WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! That is a braindead approach. The way I recommend doing it is... USE="-* fu bar blah blah blah" ...where commonly-used flags are included in USE. My rule-of-thumb is Given that * not including a flag in USE requires X entries adding it in package.use * including a flag in USE requires Y entries negating it in package.use If ( X > Y ) then include the the flag in USE else do not include the the flag in USE end if I effectively "build my own profile" rather than depend on multiple levels of inheritance. My current desktop runs with the following USE flags... USE="X apng bindist ffmpeg jpeg opengl png szip truetype x264 x265 xorg threads webp -acl -berkdb -caps -cracklib -crypt -filecaps -gallium -gdbm -graphite -gstreamer -iconv -introspection -ipc -iptables -ipv6 -libav -llvm -manpager -nls -openmp -pam -pch -sendmail -tcpd -udev -unicode -xinerama" Note all the negative flags. I'll try installing uclibc to a laptop one of these days. I figure that it'll probably have a shorter USE line if I start USE with "-*", and I will not have a larger package.use file. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
